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Biological Mechanisms: Organized to Maintain Autonomy1

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Biological Mechanisms: Organized to Maintain Autonomy1 Biological Mechanisms: Organized to Maintain Autonomy1 William Bechtel Department of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Programs in Science Studies and Cognitive Science University of California, San Diego 1. Introduction The reference to systems in the name systems biology points to a holistic emphasis that opposes an extreme reductionistic, mechanistic approach to biology that champions decomposition of biological systems into their molecular constituents and emphasis on such constituents in explanations of biological phenomenon. For some theorists who adopt the name systems biology (see, for example, van Regenmortel, 2004; Kellenberger, 2004) this entails repudiating the whole tradition of mechanistic biology. On this view, only by maintaining a focus on the whole system in which biological phenomena occur can one hope to understand such phenomena. Many other advocates of systems biology, including the editors of this volume (Boogerd et al., 2002; Boogerd, Bruggeman, Richardson, Stephan, & Westerhoff, 2005; Bruggeman, Westerhoff, & Boogerd, 2002; Bruggeman, 2005), view the focus on systems as providing an important corrective to overly reductionistic mechanism, but construe the resulting understanding to be compatible with a mechanistic perspective. To evaluate the fate of mechanism within systems biology requires us to examine carefully the commitments of mechanism. Mechanism, I will argue, has the conceptual resources to provide an adequate philosophical account of the explanatory project of systems biology, but it can do so only by placing as much emphasis on understanding the particular ways in which biological mechanisms are organized as it has on discovering the component parts of the mechanisms and their operations. For philosophy of science, the emergence of anti-mechanistic voices in biology is ironical since philosophers of science have only recently recognized and appreciated the ubiquity of appeals to mechanism in biological explanations and offered models of explanation in terms of mechanisms (Bechtel & Richardson, 1993; Glennan, 1996; 2002; Machamer, Darden, & Craver, 2000; Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 2005).2 These accounts of mechanistic explanation (which I discuss in section 2) attempt to capture what biologists themselves provide when they offer explanations of such phenomena as digestion, cell division, and protein synthesis. Like the biological accounts on which they are modeled, the philosophical accounts of mechanisms have tended to focus more on the component parts and operations in mechanisms than on how they are organized. Thus, while these accounts have identified organization as an important aspect of any account of a mechanism, they have not focused on the particular modes of organization that are required in biological systems. As a result, they fail to answer the objections of the holist critics (discussed in section 3) who claim that mechanisms, and mechanistic science, are inadequate to the phenomena of life. 1 I thank Fred Boogerd, Frank Bruggeman, Andrew Hamilton, Alvaro Moreno, Adam Streed, and Cory Wright for very useful discussions and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 2 Until the recent rise of mechanist accounts, most philosophical accounts of explanation viewed universal laws as the key element in an explanation (see, for example, Hempel, 1965, for the canonical presentation of the deductive- nomological model). This has seemed particularly problematic in the context of biology, since biologists infrequently offer laws, and when offered, they seem more to describe the phenomena than to provide explanations of it. Bechtel: Organization and Biological Mechanisms p. 2 Part of the challenge of developing an adequate account of mechanism stems from the fact that when thinking about how mechanisms are organized, humans tend to think in terms of linear pathways: the product of the operation of one part of a mechanism is passed to another part of a mechanism, which then performs its operation.3 But natural systems (and increasingly engineered systems) rely on far more complex, non-linear modes of organization. Understanding the significance of modes of non-linear modes of organization is daunting, as the history of the development of the concept of negative feedback exemplifies. Many centuries passed between its first known application by Ktesibios in approximately 270 BCE to insure a constant flow of water into a water clock, until it was recognized as a principle of organization that enabled controlled behavior by complex systems. In the subsequent two millennia it had to be repeatedly rediscovered in different contexts in which control was needed (Mayr, 1970). For example, windmills need to be pointed into the wind, and a British blacksmith E. Lee developed the fantail as a feedback system to keep the windmill properly oriented. When furnaces were developed, temperature regulation became important and Cornelis Drebbel designed such a regulator around 1624. A major turning in the recognition of negative feedback as a common design principle followed James Watt’s introduction in 1788 of a governor for his steam engine (Figure 1). This Figure 1: A schematic representation of the governor James Watt designed for his steam engine. The speed of the flywheel determines how far out the angle arms move by centripetal force. They are in turn linked to the valve in such a way that when the flywheel is turning too quickly, the steam supply is reduced, and when it is turning too slowly, the steam supply is increased. Drawing reproduced from J. Farley (1827), A treatise on the steam engine: Historical, practical, and descriptive, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green. 3 This linear focus is highlighted in Machamer, Darden, and Craver’s characterization of mechanisms as providing continuous accounts from start up to termination conditions. This emphasizes the role of mechanisms in producing things, but at the cost of downplaying the often cyclic nature of their internal operation. This tendency is exhibited in biochemists portrayal of chemical pathways such as fermentation as linear streams from starting substances (glucose) to products (alcohol). Various reactions such as the reduction of NAD+ are shown to the side of the main linear pathway, but following these reactions often reveals cyclic relations which link different reactions in the main pathway (see Bechtel & Richardson, 1993, chapter 7). Bechtel: Organization and Biological Mechanisms p. 3 became the focus of mathematical analysis by James Clerk Maxwell (1868). The idea of feedback control was further developed and utilized in a variety of fields in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, it was employed for automated ship and airplane navigation; Elmer Ambrose Sperry developed a version of the gyroscope adequate for such functions in 1908 and in 1910 founded the Sperry Gyroscope Company. During World War I he became involved in the design of devices to guide anti-aircraft fire and continued to provide guidance to the U.S. military in the interwar period. Although the system Sperry developed, the T-6 antiaircraft gun director, used negative feedback in its internal analog computations, it did not use feedback from the target (Mindell, 1995). In the 1930s Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow at MIT tried to apply feedback from the target to control anti-aircraft fire. They soon encountered an obstacle: if the feedback signal was at all noisy and the system responded too quickly, feedback caused it to go into uncontrollable oscillations. Through consulting Mexican physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, they learned of similar behavior in human patients with damage to the cerebellum and came to recognize the importance of dampening the feedback signal to achieve reliable control. The limitations they found in negative feedback did not dissuade them of its importance; to the contrary, it suggested to them that it was a fundamental principle of design in biological systems and, they proposed, social and engineered systems as well. In a paper published in Philosophy of Science, they argued that negative feedback provided a means of resuscitating notions such as purpose and teleology, enabling these concepts to be applied to both biological and engineered systems without invoking vitalism (Rosenblueth, Wiener, & Bigelow, 1943). Their idea was straightforward and powerful—if feedback enabled the system to maintain a given temperature, then maintaining that temperature was that system’s goal or telos. Wiener and his collaborators championed the notion of negative feedback as a fundamental principle of design, and with support from the Macy Foundation, they established a series of twice-yearly conferences known as the Conference for Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems. Wiener later coined the term cybernetics from the Greek word for steersman (Wiener, 1948) for feedback control. Thereafter, the conference he and his collaborators had begun was called the Conference on Cybernetics and the term cybernetics was applied generally to the movement that attempted to understand control in biological and artificial systems in terms of negative feedback. In section 4 I will show how negative feedback, along with such notions as maintaining a constant internal environment, provided an important step in biologists attempt to address the concerns of vitalists. As challenging as it was for humans to master the concept of negative feedback, it is the simplest of non-linear modes of organization to understand.
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